Journey of Re-Discovery – Part III
A Startling Change of Direction
When I came back from Britain, I was changed in ways that I could not even begin to fathom. Suddenly, my life as a married woman, living at home, wasn’t so fulfilling. I started asking questions of myself… and then I got a channeled message from some Light Beings that basically told me it was time to stop hiding away.
I wasn’t living my life; I was living my husband’s. Yes, he had given the time to begin searching into areas, but he wasn’t going there with me. In my heart, I knew I would have to take the next part of my journey alone.
This feeling only grew through the autumn, winter and spring months. At some point, my husband attended a conference and there met a woman with whom he instantly clicked. This person was married and lived in the Olympia area. Together, my husband and his new friend attempted to grow the acquaintance to include myself and her husband. Yet all I could see was how my husband was relating to another.
I wasn’t jealous for I knew that my husband wasn’t in love with this person, but he was able to talk to her like he had never been able to talk to me… even before we got married. David was very emotionally repressed, something stemming from his own upbringing and childhood. There was no true intimacy between us… just a kind of friendship stemming from our mutual interest in the mountains. When that began to change, suddenly there wasn’t much to keep us together.
By sometime the following spring, I decided that I had had enough. I would go to business college and get a job. So I enrolled in a program located in downtown Seattle and took the bus to get there. That summer, I found myself saying good-bye to the trees and mountains with which I had spent so much time hiking and backpacking.
By the following autumn, I had moved to Spokane, at first intending to work with the two channelers with whom I had come to know as at least friends. However, when I actually got to Spokane and saw how these two individuals interacted as a married couple, I determined that I would attempt to get my own job and place to live.
I found a little basement apartment in an old house on the South Hill. That November, I received the final divorce papers from my husband and fell immediately into a profound depression. I hadn’t realized just how much I loved him, but it was too late now. I was free. Sometimes freedom comes with a heavy price.
I found a job… and eventually also found some friends. Continuing on with my metaphysical journey started in Seattle, I connected with another small group who were exploring a kind of meditation. We would sit in a circle with one facilitator and then tell our impressions of what we were seeing. I found that I could see quite a bit…
Yet the important thing about this group was that I first encountered the books of the I AM movement there. The facilitator had a couple of the books in a bookcase in her living room. I asked if I could take them home and she said yes. I ended up devouring them… filling my head up with tales of St. Germain, Mt. Shasta, the Great White Brotherhood, degrees and the like.
While in Spokane, I joined another couple of hiking groups and took up horseback riding. By the second summer, I was riding every week and getting quite good for having started so late in life (mid-30’s).
I don’t remember the particulars, but soon afterward, by the following spring I had contacted members of the Church Universal and Triumphant. I eagerly gulped up the teaching about the Ascended Masters, angels and Archangels. I listened to the dictations given by the Messenger, Elizabeth Clare Prophet. And I attended some of the sessions, Wednesday night healing sessions, Friday night Ascension session and Sunday services, all held in the living room of a small house.
I was being pushed from within to quickly expand. Very late, I decided to attend the Fourth of July Gathering held at the Summit Lighthouse campus near Malibu, California. I flew to Los Angeles on faith, having no place to stay or knowing anything about L.A. or its environs. While waiting for a bus to get me to the campus, I met a lady who was also attending the conference. She volunteered to get me a place to at least sleep for the long weekend. Everything fell into place as things do when you are meant to be somewhere…
Yes, I slept on the floor along with several other people, but there was a roof over my head and transportation to and fro the conference.
I was a beginner and not yet a Keeper of the Flame, which is what the Church Universal and Triumphant calls (or called) its members. So I was relegated to the beginners’ tent to learn simple degrees, receive teachings until we could attend the evening sessions where the Messenger would give a lecture and then deliver a dictation from one of the Ascended hosts.
My first dictation was from Archangel Raphael. According to some of my instructor / hosts, that was supposed to mean something… What exactly I still cannot say…
In the following days, I was baptized and then had a strange “memory” come to me… about being the Twin Flame of Stephen the Martyr. I felt an intense love of Jesus and many of the other Masters who were entering into my conscious awareness for the first time in this lifetime, St. Germain, Serapis Bey, Kuthumi, and others. And the magnificent Archangels and their Archeia (female counterparts)… for me Archangel Michael stood out by far. I didn’t understand the “why”, I just KNEW Him and put a card with His picture in my new degree book.
This conference was a total blur of new sensations, knowledge and knowingness erupting to the surface of my confused ego mind. Before I went home, I found out that the next session of Summit University would be held in Montana, at the Royal Teton Ranch, located to the south of Livingston, Montana and just north of Yellowstone National Park. By mid-September, I found myself having quit my job, sold most of my belongings and moving to the Ranch. I would spent the next two years there and a total of four and half years as a Keeper of the Flame. It was life-changing experience for me. I would never be the same person as I was before.
The Royal Teton Ranch
For someone who has never been to Montana, it is hard to imagine the enormity of the land and the skies. “Big Skies of Montana” could not be more true a saying. The land is vast and large tracts are still relatively empty of people, filled with large ranches, small towns, farms, tall, tall mountains, boisterous rivers and huge lakes. As I drove to Montana on a cloudy September day I had no idea what I was getting into… yet, again. I was one to take chances and to forget about the consequences of not following the pattern of a “normal” life. The spirit within was a very demanding one and I was learning to obey its wishes.
When I arrived at the “Ranch”, I found the lodgings to be a scattering of old mining trailers. I had to share a room with two other women and sleep in a bunk. Needless to say, my expectations crashed to the ground. This wasn’t going to be a picnic in the woods; quite the opposite. It would be a struggle to survive the next two years.
My “job” was in the Construction Office. Since I had some office skills, I could be a clerk. I was never quite sure of what I was doing there, but shared office space with guys coming and going on different jobs. The Ranch was being turned into the eventual headquarters of the Church Universal and Triumphant.
The climate of Montana was another shock. The Ranch was situated on the Yellowstone River, at some 5,000 feet in elevation, deep in the Rockies. While initially dry, it got quite cold there in the winter months. Autumn lasted two weeks, with the golden leaves of the cottonwood and aspen blazing against the rugged rocky slopes of the steep valley and then abruptly dropping to the ground. The first snows hit in October and by November, the temperatures plunged into the -30 degree F range, cold enough to make your nose whiskers freeze as we walked quickly between buildings.
Considered still a “beginner”, I did my degrees with a small group in a room separate from those who were considered “staff” and other Keepers of the Flame who came in for sessions, especially in the evenings and on weekends.
The schedule was grueling. We were expected to get up at 5 a.m., wash, dress and go to degrees for at least an hour and half before breakfast; then breakfast was served in a cafeteria – you ate whatever was being served; then we went to “work”, whatever that consisted of for each person. Around noon, it was lunch time, everyone breaking then to eat and then back to work. By four, it was quitting time, so you could go “home”, clean up and dress for the evening session. Next came dinner and then more degrees… sometimes lasting into the wee hours if there was to be a dictation that night. We worked half day on Saturday and then had the afternoon to do whatever and were expected to be at dinner and later degrees by evening.
Degrees are a kind of mantra, spoken in rhythmic fashion often quite fast… blazing would be a good description of the degrees done by senior staff members. The degrees were based on the Seven Rays of God: Blue (Indigo) for the First Ray, Archangel Michael, El Morya, Chohan; Pink, Second Ray, Archangel Chamuel, Paul the Venetian… and so on. Anyone curious to learn more can go to the Summit Lighthouse website. They still have a publishing house and various study groups sprinkled around the world.
Besides the opportunity to learn about the Ascended Masters, et al, I was being given a first class education on spiritual pride and the misuse of power. By the time I arrived at the Ranch, I had not yet personally encountered the Messenger, Elizabeth Clare Prophet. I would have an opportunity to direct a few of her phone calls to her office that was nearby the reception center, in a little cabin at the entrance of the Ranch grounds. We were expected to cover the receptionist on occasion. One day, I got to take the phones… and the Messenger called. Recognizing the voice on the other end, I was a bit awkward on the phone and fumbled a bit with the connection. For that, I received a scolding and wasn’t allowed to answer the phones ever again. Early on, I found that ECP was not very pleasant in person.
While her followers attributed this irritability to ECP being “on the Blue Ray”, I thought it was something else. She was just rude and arrogant. I started to question to validity of some of the material that she claimed was coming from the Ascended Masters. And when ECP assigned “past” lives of great glory to various members of her own family, I begin to understand the concept of spiritual hubris or pride. There was no humility in the woman, something that exists in plentitude within REAL Masters.
After a few months of the brutal schedule, I came down with some kind of influenza. I ended up lying in my bunk (lower one, so I wouldn’t fall) in a feverish state, barely eating or drinking for ten days. When I finally emerged from my sick bed, I was as weak as a new-born lamb, barely able to walk or talk. Yet, I felt like I had been reborn into a new being. Just what that being consisted of was yet to be discovered.
I had lived at the Ranch for a year before the first Summit University was opened. Students from all around the world attended. There were Germans, Swedes, and Brits, a couple of people from South America and from various parts of the States. And now that I was a student, I was compelled to move to another residence, still another mining trailer, but this time located miles from the Ranch to the north.
We traveled by bus to degrees, breakfast and then class for the next three months. Sometime in the winter or early spring, I knew that my health was waning. I was extremely fatigued and experiencing strange aches all over my body, especially where there was a grouping of lymph nodes. My throat was swollen all of the time and sometimes I ran a low-grade fever. I woke up from disturbed sleep soaking from night sweats and became extremely depressed. Still, as much as I could, I attended classes, degrees and all the rest.
By spring, I was losing weight. From being about 130 pounds, I had dropped to under 120 pounds and could wear a size 6 in clothes. While that weight may be considered stylish by some, I was underweight for my height, and tired all the time.
When my parents visited in the early summer of the second year, I was reluctantly given permission to spend some time with them. Relationships between family members and church members was not encouraged. All outsiders were considered “them” and insiders spoken of being “chosen by God.” Sound familiar? It was a cult, nothing less, nothing more. And there I was, alone, in the wilderness with a bunch of nice people… no wonder most of my relatives had, by this time, written me off as being rather strange, even demented.
I was entirely and completely engaged in being there at the Ranch. In fact, I wanted to stay on as a staff member but at the end of my second summer, I was denied that privilege and ended up being told that I needed to leave The Ranch.
This little personal event occurred at the same time the Yellowstone fires were raging to the south of the Ranch, part of which bordered on the northern boundary of the Park. When I left the Ranch, the fires were still burning; we had been breathing smoke for over two months. Occasionally we watched with fascination as the great fires ran up a ridge sending billows of smoke into the skies, until the world was obscured by smoke and ash. It was a suitable setting for how I felt in those days…
My life seemed to be made up of one shock after another. Here was another startling turn of events, but in the end, one that helped me break free, eventually from the hold that the church and its culture had over me. Still it would take another year or more to break free completely.
As I drove my packed car out of the Ranch grounds, through the open cattle gate and onto the Gallatin Highway, I whispered to myself, “I’m free!”
Never was it so true… I felt a huge release, yet as I wrote above, the Church still had its claws in my flesh and it took a while to extricate myself from this influence.
What next? I drove to my parent’s house in Seattle and then onto my elder sister’s house in British Columbia. I was still a stranger in a strange land. You have to remember that I had lived in a purposefully closed culture for a period of two solid years and was in a fragile physical condition, now weighing only 113 pounds.
The reaction of the elder sister to my presence was eye-opening. After spending an afternoon doing food preparation, baking bread and making dinner for the family, we sat down to eat at the table. In the enjoyment of the moment, someone had forgotten to leave the light on for my sister who was at choir practice or some other event early that evening. And when she came home and opened the door, she looked in on what passed for a complete family unit, her sister (me), her boyfriend and two children, quietly eating dinner. She went berserk.
There’s no other word for it. The lady completely lost it. The crying, yelling and shrieking went on for literally hours. For the first time in my life, I did not recognize this being who was supposed to be a dear elder sister. What topped that, however, was the next day when the two of us went into Victoria for a shopping trip, she completely suspended the berserk act and behaved as if nothing untoward had happened. I was appalled. Whether or not my sister was possessed by entities or just emotionally unbalanced, I was determined to go. And so I did. It was the beginning of letting go of what had been a large extended family when I was growing up. I didn’t have a choice in the matter. It wasn’t safe for me to be around her, so I left the island and drove back to my parents…
A couple of weeks later, I found refuge in a friend’s house in Spokane and spent the autumn, winter and spring there. By the following June, I was again in Montana…
The story continues in Part IV: What is a Spiritual Journey?